(p. 23)

TWELFTH DAY

THE GOD IN MAN

            (In answer to doubts.)

            Spirit loq. We can give you courage to assert your faith, to be the means whereby many shall seek God in the divine seclusion of their own souls, where He dwells in all alike, a potentiality of mighty meaning, whether in the blackest soul of sinner or in the purest child of Good.

            We will show you that Christ knew man and what is in man when he spoke of the Scriptures as saying to the children of men, “Ye are Gods”; when he answered those who doubted God’s abode and power within himself, “But if I – the son of man – cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you”;

(p. 24)

when he urged on his disciples, “for it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you.”

            Truly we cannot turn the faces of men Godwards; but we can tell them, that which we know – that they shall see God if they do so turn them. Do we not know, and have we not experienced that Faith is the result of the growth of spiritual eyesight; that God is man’s spiritual Sun – “the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” the Light which shineth in darkness; the Light which is the Life of men? Do we not know that Christ came into the world to show man that his mortal body is verily the temple of God and as such may become literally and truly pure and perfect?

            You cannot, you say, reconcile the belief in man’s latent goodness and power over all he calls evil, i.e., sin, sickness, poverty, and death, with your own sense of the utter inadequacy of human effort to attain the results it seeks. Neither can you trust man’s motives, you say, in possessing himself of his divine birthright the God-given power within, of assimilating into his being good or God. You picture to yourself that these powers and this knowledge of Godhead might be attained apart from the Love which alone can administer such powers and direct such knowledge. You conceive that a man, intensely desirous of earthly power, one steeped in self seeking and purely temporary aims, might attach himself to God or good in such a way as to acquire powers over nature of immortal duration, and thus stereotype evil on the Earth more firmly than ever.

            But these doubts and fears proceed from ignorance, because your mind is still tinged throughout by its clinging to the long cherished Idol of the World, the idea of the supremacy of evil thwarting and even superseding the action of the Divine. The World has failed hitherto through its ignorance of the absolute omnipotence and infallibility of the good or God in man and

(p. 25)

throughout Nature; and in proportion as it has fallen short in its faith in God or good as supreme, have been the results which you call evil. Exactly in proportion as it has doubted good or God, has it refrained from taking possession of good or God, and thus far what it calls evil or the absence of good, has prevailed and predominated; thus far has evil come to be regarded by man as an absolute existence combating and at times even overpowering God.